So goes the internet bio of photographer Louis Teran... Nirvana for that dose of urban grunge edge spreading through his portraits, Fallen Angels for that moment at 15 when he realised he wanted to be a photographer. London, Paris, rocknroll, Mondino and now, independent photographer with his latest exhibition at Les Rencontres d'Arles exhibition in Arles France. We met up with Louis to find out more about his signature portraits and photographic endeavours...

CM: How did you get into photography?
I still don’t know, really. I think everything started from the day my father took me to the cinema to see Fallen Angels from the great Wong Kar Wai. I was 15. I was profoundly struck by the subjectivity of the camera, its angles, its movements. I then understood the power of narration through image. But I was not into photography at that time, but I went for it a little less than ten years later.

CM: What kind of aesthetic directs your work? Is there a common thread binding your various projects?
Expressionism and metaphysics are the core of my sensitivities regarding photography. I think they both kind of melted into one direction that became my own language. It sounds a bit pompous but it is what i feel.
I’ve been very much steeped in expressionism, whether it is in cinema or in painting. I love the brutal emotions and ideas that comes out of faces and settings.That is exactly what i am looking for when I make portraits of people.

CM: Tell us more about the subjects you seek out? What are you trying to reveal through your work?
I don’t seek out anything to be honest, I just come across them. I find my subjects on Facebook, on Instagram, in some dinners at friends’s etc. If somebody inspires more than for a portrait by going for a whole work and trying to tell a story or an idea with it.

CM: What kind of equipment do you use? Camera?
I’m using a Canon 5D Mark3 with a 24-70mm lens. It’s not a great lens but I love its range flexibility.

CM: Can you tell us more about your work in film?
I’m working with film only when my client wants me to make a film. I don’t consider myself as a director, at all. I haven’t developed any cinematographic vision or ambition, for now...

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CM: Your favourite photograph of all time?
I cannot answer to that question, but I can tell you I have a great admiration for the works of Edward Steichen and Saul Leiter. They went very deep into photography. Two fantastic
photographers.

CM: How did you break into the world of advertising with your photographs?
Thanks to some people who believed in my work. It works like this. It always does. And it will go on this way.

CM: How does photographing design and interiors differ from your other subject matters?
It doesn’t. When you make a portrait of someone or a photo of an interior, you’re looking for the same thing: absolute harmony between elements and their environment. Only the dynamic of the shooting is different, obviously. Design/interior shootings are more relax (although not less tiring than portraits) because you shoot objects. Objects don’t move, they don’t tire, they have no mood, you can stay hours in front of them thinking how you’re gonna shoot them. With a human being, it is another story. You have to be very careful, reassuring, and to compose with constant variability.

CM: Can you tell us more about your latest exhibition? Arles?
Havas agency organized an exhibition in Arles with selected works from a photographic theme they proposed to photographers. It was about making a photo directly inspired by a novel part from a great author. Two pictures I made were selected for that exhibition. One picture was inspired by Charles Bukowski’s Wine Stained Notebook, and the other one by Thomas pinchon’s Against the Day.
CM: Motto you live by?
Epicureanism. But the real one, not the clichéd version.